Celebrate Earth Day, every day, with Windows Mobile |
| | Ever since Earth Day celebrations began nearly 40 years ago, a growing number of us have become mindful of the ways in which our habits and behaviors impact our communities and the planet as a whole. As we strive to consume less energy and to implement reduction, reuse, and recycling into our everyday lives, all the seemingly small changes we make can, together, add up to big environmental gains.
Your Windows Mobile phone can assist you in doing your part to help the planet and the people on it, too, in ways that you might not have thought about. From planning your commute to composting and sharing environmental tips with your friends and family, Windows Mobile helps you make the world a little bit greener.
My phone is a Palm Treo Pro running Windows Mobile 6.1 with service from Sprint. |
| Cut down on your fossil fuel emissions | There’s little credible disagreement that fossil fuel emissions are a major cause of environmental harm, so switching your mode of travel from a single-person vehicle to a carpool, bus, or bike is probably the single most dramatic change that any of us can make—and your Windows Mobile phone can help make that transition easier. Your Windows Mobile phone can provide information on bus routes, bike trails, or commuter trains. It can even direct you to lists of potential carpools, through services like craigslist. Yes, you can access this information from your desktop or laptop too, but when you’re at lunch or having coffee with friends, it's much handier to simply use your Windows Mobile phone. With your mobile phone, it’s easy to change your plans and share information in real-time.
Here’s how to get online and start searching for commute alternatives.
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| Inspire others to conserve | There are plenty of things that you can do at home to conserve energy, as well. In my household, we recently started recycling our food scraps—something that we initially thought wouldn’t make that much difference in our carbon footprint.
Boy, were we wrong.
It turns out that the majority of the kitchen waste we generate is compostable and, by participating in our city’s curbside food scrap collection, we not only help create rich soil for our local parks, but we also no longer have to pay for additional trash pickup for having exceeded our weekly limit. It’s a small adjustment, but it yields big rewards. I want to share the surprising gains from this simple modification, so I’m using my phone to send pictures to my Windows Live Spaces page (http://mobile.spaces.live.com/) and begin my proselytizing from there!
First, I took a couple of pictures of our recycling container. I didn’t show the contents—it’s much more appetizing to simply consider the results of the composting. To access the camera: | From the Start menu, go to Pictures & Videos. The camera icon is in the upper-left corner of the screen. (For the Treo, you can also start the camera functionality by pressing the smaller of the two buttons on the left edge of the phone.) Take pictures of whatever Earth-friendly activity you’re engaging in—composting, volunteering, or commuting by bike. You name it—whatever you’re doing can inspire other people by example. Select the photo you want to send to your space, and click Menu. Then, click Send to your space. If you haven’t already established a connection between your phone and your space, you’ll be prompted to do so in a few simple steps. From here, you can direct all your friends to the URL for your Spaces page. They’ll see the pictures of your recycling tub and read what it’s meant to your weekly trash collection. You can send the URL in e-mail, in a text message, or even post it to Twitter—your choice. Either way takes just a few seconds.
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| Choose an Earth-friendly phone | It’s not just what you can do with your phone that can make your life a little greener. You can also select a phone that incorporates greener principles into its design and packaging.
Take the Sprint Palm Treo Pro. I’ve recently set up mine, with the assistance of a very helpful salesperson, and was impressed by some of the seemingly little things that make the device a bit more environmentally friendly. First, they’ve reduced the material that comes along with the device—the kind of thing that not long ago would have occasioned an accompanying CD or DVD. They’ve also designed the phone hardware so that instead of having two separate cords—one for charging the phone and one for connecting to the computer—there is only one, which uses the plug base as an adapter. The salesperson also informed me that the instructional material included with the device and the box itself are all made from 100-percent recycled materials. |
| Recycle or donate your old phone | When it’s time to get a new phone, it’s important to remember to recycle your old devices. Most carriers provide detailed instructions on how to properly recycle their phones. Here are some of them:
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| Have a happy and healthy Earth Day! Remember that your efforts go even further to inspire others when you share your experience using your Windows Mobile phone. If you want to share your ideas with folks beyond your friends and family, consider joining one of the Windows Mobile newsgroups or forums. |
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